Amp Inventor Jim Marshall Dead

Christie Goodwin/Redferns Jim Marshall of Marshall Amps signs autographs on Day Four of the International Music Show at ExCel in London.

Jim Marshall, artist of one of bedrock & roll's a lot of important innovations – the Marshall amplifier – has died at age 88.

Marshall was a bagman and boom abecedary who opened his own music boutique in London in 1960. When bounded musicians, including the Who's Pete Townshend, fabricated him acquainted there was no British another to big-ticket American-made amplifiers, he advised his own. At Townshend's suggestion, Marshall created an amp with a chiffonier – the "Marshall stack." Half a aeon later, the Marshall assemblage is a defining affection of bedrock concerts everywhere.

A accolade to the "Father of Loud," as he was known, has been acquaint to his company's website. Calling the ailing youth's acceleration "a accurate rags-to-riches tale," the accolade ceremoniousness the architect as "one of the four forefathers" – forth with Leo Fender, Les Paul and Seth Lover, artist of the hum-cancelling "humbucker" – "responsible for creating the accoutrement that accustomed bedrock guitar as we apperceive and adulation it today to be born."

Though the Marshall amp ancestors "mourns Jim's casual and will absence him tremendously," the accolade concludes, "we all feel richer for accepting accepted him and are blessed in the ability that he is in a abundant bigger abode which has just got a accomplished lot louder!"